Republican Presidential Debate: Live Coverage

You just heard John Kasich talk about ending the “death tax” in Ohio. If that feels like a term and subject out of the George W. Bush administration, then you might be a pollster. I went to go check how Republicans felt about it in the Roper Center polling archive, and I couldn’t find a single poll question even mentioning it since 2008.

And, Hayley, Rubio’s book ranked low among 2016 candidates’ titles when Time rounded up sales numbers back in July. That’s not relatable at all.

Marco Rubio talked about how he used money from his book sales to pay his student loans. Whether or not that particular story is relatable, student loans are a big problem nationally. Gallup found earlier this month that 63 percent of students who graduated college between 2006 and 2015 had student loan debt, and “more than 2 million graduates [said] they have delayed starting a business because of their student loan debt.”

If John Kasich isn’t going to support the budget deal (as 79 House Republicans did today), then it’s a safe bet that none of the Republican candidates will.

https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/659537231133192192

Rubio’s personal financial issues are sure to come up in the general election if he’s the nominee. But the truth is, the country’s budget has very little in common with family finances. For one thing, families can’t print money or impose taxes. It doesn’t make much sense when politicians say that “families have to balance their budget, so why shouldn’t the government?” And it doesn’t make much sense to suggest that because Rubio has student debt, he couldn’t manage the federal budget.

Carly Fiorina decried “crony capitalism.” And a wave of corporate mergers seems to be bearing these fears out. A smart analysis by The Wall Street Journal used the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, a measure of market concentration used in antitrust law, to show growing concentration in a variety of industries — including Internet software, media and airlines.

https://twitter.com/nataliewsj/status/659534977718165504

Jim Cramer just asked about headline-making drug prices in recent weeks. There have been a few: a 5,000 percent increase for a drug that’s mostly used by people with HIV. A drug to treat high cholesterol that’s $14,000 a year. Candidates would be smart to talk about drug prices, whether they have a solution or not: Three-quarters of Americans think that drug prices are too high and that pharmaceutical companies are to blame, according to recent polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Bush says Hillary Clinton would represent a “third term” for Obama. A bit surprised we haven’t heard that kind of language more often. The economy has improved significantly under Obama, but incomes have been stagnant, and many Americans feel like they’ve been left behind by the recovery.

I’d also say that the perception on Bush (there are lots of jokes about him dropping out on Twitter) has been worse than the reality so far. Bush hasn’t bad so much as a non-entity. But because Bush isn’t all that strong a candidate to begin with, the perception could easily become the reality. Even among establishment types, there aren’t a lot of Jeb defenders out there working to interrupt his “death spiral.”

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https://twitter.com/kasie/status/659535459450667008

I don’t think I would have guessed that Trump’s biggest impact so far in this debate would be really taking it to John Kasich.

https://twitter.com/daveweigel/status/659533964370030596

Well, sure. I suppose I gotta go along with the conventional wisdom here. A lot of people (us included) have been bullish on Cruz and Rubio lately, and I think they’ve had the best nights so far.

Cruz has been on his A-game in this debate, but when it comes to actually winning in the primaries, he’s still going to lose a lot of the more engaged “establishment” Republicans. What does this do to the race now, though? Who will he suck votes from? Rand Paul, who’s already down.

It’s as if he was reading my column on why I’m taking Ted Cruz more seriously as a candidate.

Farai, Nate, Harry: Ted Cruz has seemed like more of a presence in this debate, right? Per friend-of-the-site David Wasserman: https://twitter.com/Redistrict/status/659533879427137536

First commercial break, so it’s time for a World Series update! Brisk game so far — already in the top of the fourth inning, and it’s tied at 0. Mets got one hit, Royals still without one (but they’ve gotten a walk). Hopefully this game ends sooner than last night’s marathon!

Chris Christie’s big push for truth in budgeting is a bit ironic given his record in New Jersey, where he’s frequently employed funny accounting to balance the budget. Among the steps he’s taken: delaying payments to state pension funds.

Some of these guys should get kicked to JV next round; it’s hard for the moderators to reach everyone with so many people on stage. Every candidate has only gotten one question (not counting the “what’s your greatest weakness” ice-breaker). Carson, Cruz, Kasich and Trump have eked out a little more time by being insulted by other candidates and winning some time to reply, and Bush, Christie, Cruz and Fiorina have just gone ahead and interrupted to grab stage time.

Criticizing sitting legislators for missing votes while on the campaign trail is an ancient technique, of little interest to voters, and is usually a sign that a critic doesn’t have better arguments. When John F. Kennedy was running for the Senate in 1952, his Republican opponent, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., regularly attacked him for missing votes in the House, as Sean Savage points out in in his JFK book, “The Senator from New England.” The Boston Herald, friendly to Lodge, pointed out that Kennedy had missed 29 percent of his roll call votes, while Lodge had missed only 5 percent. Kennedy ignored the attacks, and so did voters, sending him to the Senate.

We’re coming up on the halfway point in this debate, and among issues that haven’t come up substantively: — global economies and their impacts on the United States (China and its recent market destabilization; Eurozone and the possible “Brexit”) — migrants fleeing Syria and other nations and how if at all the U.S. should be involved in resettlement — race relations — policing — the intersection of race relations and policing — educational testing, which President Obama just put new caps on as a percentage of educational time — roads and infrastructure What do we think we’ll get to?

Rand Paul has often seemed invisible during this campaign. But his name has come up a lot this week here in Iowa. Several people have said they like his libertarian brand of conservatism. But less positively, few of those people have said they think he has a chance to win.

Harry, the whole country — not just Republicans — distrusts the media: A September Gallup poll showed that America’s trust in mainstream media is down from 55 percent to 40 percent. It’s especially low among Republicans — just 32 percent said they had a great deal or fair amount of trust in the mainstream media.

Yes, Nate, and Ted Cruz going after the media is a smart move in a Republican primary. According to a 2015 Newseum Institute First Amendment Center poll, only 19 percent of Republicans believe the media tries to report the news without bias. Democrats, at 36 percent, were far more likely to think that the news media tried to report without bias.

John Boehner’s last order of business before relinquishing his U.S. House speakership was to broker a two-year budget agreement with President Obama. And that has pissed off a lot of the most ardent conservatives in Congress. Specifically, they are upset that the deal is the second in a row to rebuff some spending cuts mandated in the so-called sequester agreed to in 2011. But if you can plug your ears to all the shouts of “runaway spending!” and look at the long-term data, you’ll see that the U.S. federal budget deficit, as a percentage of GDP, has shrunk to 2.8 percent from its peak near 10 percent in 2009. That said, total government debt as a percentage of GDP has leveled off at about 100 percent of GDP — an amount unprecedented since the 1950s.

Rubio and Cruz are competing to out-Newt each other tonight.

We always talk about the need for candidates to stand out in debate. Carly Fiorina has, and yet it hasn’t helped. Yes, she bumped up to 10 percent in the Huffington Post/Pollster.com aggregate after the last Republican debate. Today, she’s at only 4 percent in the same aggregate. If Fiorina gets the same bump this time around, she has to find a way to hold it.

Thankfully, the latest budget agreement raises the federal debt ceiling, thus avoiding a catastrophic default by the U.S. government next week — an event that would make use of the FiveThirtyEight staff debate on the question “Are Republicans Or Democrats More Likely To Survive The Apocalypse?”

Several candidates — most recently Jeb Bush — have mentioned the low rate of labor force participation. They’re right that the rate has fallen to the lowest level since the 1970s. But that’s as much a reflection of long-term trends as it is a measure of the current economy. As The Wall Street Journal’s Josh Zumbrun explained earlier this month, most of the people out of the labor force are either retired or in school. And much of the drop in participation is due to the retirement of the baby-boom generation. Still, there are millions of Americans who aren’t looking for work but say they want a job. Moving those people off the sidelines and back into the labor force will be a key economic challenge for the next president.

Jeb Bush speaks to the fundamental optimism of the American people — 62 percent of whom, according to a Wall Street Journal poll, are pessimistic about the country’s future.

Rubio got a major spike in Google search traffic after that exchange; Jeb Bush got almost none.

We’re getting exactly the tussle between Jeb! and Rubio that we expected; they’re stuck in somewhat of a zero-sum game.

Outsiders are still … long shots. “We cannot elect somebody who does not know how to do this job,” Kasich says. Rubio scoffs at the idea of “wait[ing] in line” for leadership. Number of U.S. presidents who never held office before taking the presidency: five. Number of 20th century presidential nominees who never held office before: four.

Marco Rubio is going to get hit over the fact that he will have served only one term in the Senate, if he is elected. The funny thing is that Republican voters have been willing to nominate candidates who have six years or less experience. Remember George W. Bush? He had been Texas governor from 1995 to 2000. How about Mitt Romney? He had been governor of Massachusetts for just four years.

Pretty much any economist will agree with Fiorina that the U.S. tax code is too complicated. It’s riddled with loopholes and other provisions that distort the economy and, in many cases, benefit big corporations and the wealthy. Most economists would like to get rid of many if not most tax deductions, including the mortgage-interest deduction, deductions for state and local taxes, and others. The problem is that those deductions tend to be popular. Getting rid of them won’t be easy.

It’s impossible for an average viewer to evaluate tax plans based on the shaky numbers and paltry information provided in a debate like this one. The moderators can try all they want to point out that these promises don’t add up in the absence of massive spending cuts, but the candidates can simply say — as Carson just did — that everything will come out fine when their plans are released. And of course, no one really reads those tax plans, no legislator seriously tries to implement them, and candidates quickly skate to the next question with zero accountability.

I can’t imagine that most voters follow the nitty-gritty, Micah, but I think this is a chance to showcase presentation. If you have a command of your numbers (note that I say your numbers, not the numbers), you can make an impression.

To your question, Micah, I’m not sure voters care all that much about the nitty-gritty details. Instead, they’re probably affected more by media coverage of the debate, which tends to focus more on personality. To the extent policy matters, it’s more about voters getting a sense of how the candidates line up overall — if a candidate proves himself to be far more conservative or far more liberal than they thought going in, that could conceivably matter. I don’t think that reflects poorly on voters, however. A lot of the details during debates are exaggerations or wishful thinking.

Ben, I don’t doubt any of that, but Ohio voters back home certainly like what Kasich did — whatever he did. His approval rating in a Quinnipiac poll out in the last month was an astounding 62 percent. That’s high for a state that is in the middle of the political spectrum.

John Kasich is bragging about his strong fiscal record as governor of Ohio. Keep in mind: He’s required by law to balance his state’s budget. And in general, it’s wise to be cautious about giving governors too much credit (or blame) for how their states’ economies perform on their watch. As Donald Trump noted, for example, Ohio has benefited from an oil boom that Kasich didn’t create. That said, governors do have more influence over their states’ economies than most other political leaders. So don’t ignore their records; just make sure to keep them in perspective.

They certainly care about the issue overall — a February Pew poll found that 66 percent of Republicans believe that the tax system needs to be fundamentally revamped, but they don’t necessarily agree on how to do that. In Pew’s poll, 53 percent of Republicans were bothered by how complex the tax system is.

This may be a stupid question, but do voters pay attention to these nitty-gritty policy details? Does it all come across as noise?

Quick reading note from the Harvard Business Review: leadership and narcissism. I’m not naming names, but author Michael Maccoby does in a separate article (erm, Trump).

You saw Chris Christie attack socialism. It’s a good play in a Republican primary. According to a June Gallup poll, 26 percent of Republicans said they would be willing to vote for a socialist. That’s 19 percentage points lower than the percent of Republicans who said they would be willing to vote for a Muslim, which, among the options Gallup listed, was the type of candidate Republicans were the second least likely to vote for.

Trump is one of only a handful of GOP candidates who have released detailed tax proposals. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has a great summary of what all of the candidates have said on taxes and how their plans compare. One interesting thing: Four years after Mitt Romney implicitly criticized the U.S. tax code for letting too many Americans get out of paying taxes, most of this year’s candidates would actually increase the share of Americans who pay no income tax.